Fit Rubric

Use this rubric to decide whether a candidate deserves deeper research. It is not a market score. It measures whether Merkle-authenticated peer state changes the trust model enough to justify the complexity.

Score each question 0, 1, or 2.

Questions

Multi-peer truth
0: one authority owns almost all relevant facts
1: one main authority plus acknowledgements
2: two or more peers each own necessary facts
Statefulness
0: one-shot signed messages are enough
1: some updates matter
2: evolving state and old states both matter
Negative claims
0: only positive statements matter
1: some absence or revocation matters
2: exclusion is central
Selective disclosure
0: full disclosure is fine
1: privacy is useful
2: verifiers usually need only a slice of each peer's state
Composed outcome
0: one proof decides the result
1: multiple proofs help
2: the final result is inherently derived from several peer proofs
Dispute or audit pressure
0: low stakes, low replay value
1: moderate
2: disputes, audits, or delayed settlement are common
Why signatures alone fail
0: a signed blob would do
1: signatures work, but awkwardly
2: committed state is materially better
Certification ladder
0: verified facts are consumed once
1: some derived claims can be reused
2: certified derived facts naturally become reusable building blocks

Interpretation

0-6: bad fit
7-10: maybe
11-13: strong fit
14-16: excellent fit

Before advancing a candidate, pair the score with:

a one-sentence value proposition
the safest software role
the main legal, governance, or operational risk
the infrastructure layer needed: signed roots, witness feed, metadata anchoring, or scripted claim-history anchors

Shortcut

If a protocol is:

multi-peer
stateful
composed

then it is worth serious investigation.